TYRAM

The gun barrels thankfully left Tyram's view when Andry blasted the weapons out of Birger's hands. Tyram rolled towards Andry to get some distance from the pirate, his eyes catching the guns on the ground. Auram floated off them like sparkling steam, revealing a pair of cheap ordinary guns underneath.

“Quick,” Andry said. “While he's disarmed.”

The two knights charged the long bearded pirate. Apparently ignoring them, he reached down and picked a stick up off the ground. It shimmered in Birger's hand and sprouted into an enormous metal bat with spikes on one end. Birger swung the bat into Andry's chest, sending him flying. He tried to catch Tyram on the backswing, but Tyram ducked under the bat and delivered a meaty punch to the pirate's gut. When that blow wasn't enough to bring Birger down he followed up with a pair of quick jabs. The pirate went down, but not before slamming his bat into Tyram's back. They fell apart, Tyram stumbling towards Andry.

“What did he hit me with?” Andry groaned.

“A stick,” Tyram said.

“A stick?” Andry coughed. “That's all? I mean alright it didn't get through my regalia but still...”

“I think it could have been anything,” Tyram said. “I think that's what his Regalia does. It doesn't give him any extra powers, maybe the basic durability and strength stuff, but it lets him basically give anything he's holding its own Regalia.”

“I'd have said that sounded kinda weak if he wasn't kicking our asses with it,” Andry said.

“My Boatswain's Regalia isn't weak,” Birger told them, recovered and juggling a couple of rocks in one hand. “A little free advice, not that it'll do you any good once you're dead. There aren't any weak Regalia. Just weak people. A Regalia's just power, power tied right to your soul. If you've got a weak soul there's not a cannon in the universe that'll make it any stronger, and if you've got a strong soul there's not an army in the universe can put you down naked and unarmed in an open field. And the two of you? You got weakness in your eyes. You two couldn't take me with a fleet of battleships backing you up. Especially you.”

He gestured towards Tyram. It took them both an extra second to realize he'd thrown something at the same time. As the rock flew through the air auram formed a spiked ball around it, and when it landed it exploded in a hail of auram-metal shrapnel. Tyram and Andry flattened themselves to the ground as the makeshift grenade exploded, avoiding the worst of the blast.

“Still and all,” Birger said, running towards the statue in the center of the small park. “You were tough enough to kill Jalgoz, and close up brawlers are my least favorite fights. I'd better not play around.”

Tyram tried to cut him off but Birger threw a handful of stones in the knight's path, forcing him and Andry to drop to the ground again. Andry fired a few sonic blasts but the pirate weaved around them, snatching one of his fallen guns off the ground as he ducked behind the statue and climbed up on its back.

It had been a fairly ordinary statue. There were statues like it on a million worlds across the universe. A figure—in this case a human male—wearing a vacuum suit and looking stoically off into the middle distance. This one wore a more modern suit than most of those statues displayed, but Trego was a recently colonized world. It was possible the man depicted was still alive, assuming it commemorated a real person's accomplishments at all and hadn't been dreamed up because whoever built the park thought it would look better with a statue.

At Birger's touch the sculpture began to grow armor. It started at the waist and shoulders, metal plates sprouting like the scales of the a lizard. The statue stepped forwards off its pedestal, stiff but far more fluid than stone should be, giving Birger's Boatswain's Regalia the room it needed to complete it's transformation into a horror. When the transformation was complete the stoic figure had been changed into a brutal, hulking mass of spiked metal plates in vaguely human shape, it's faceplate blank except for a few more spikes sticking out at odd angles.

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“Hell,” Andry said. “Did I complain that Regalia sounded weakbefore?”

“We've got to get him off it,” Tyram said, clambering to his feet. “It can't keep its power if he isn't touching it.”

Andry nodded in agreement and the two knights ran to either side of the empowered statue, trying to get the pirate hanging on its back. Their attack was complicated by Birger, who popped up over the statue's shoulder to fire blasts of auram at them from his recovered (and re-empowered) gun. Some part of Tyram's mind crossed “can only empower one object at a time” off a list of Birger's potential weaknesses. Birger's fire was focused on Andry, probably because Andry had the ranged attacks, and Tyram tried to press his advantage.

He met the statue's fist coming the other way.

It felt like he'd run into an oncoming truck. An auram user might have been more powerful. The statue was using borrowed auram, after all. In the end it was a weapon with no will of its own. But even with that, and with the protection of his Tyram's own Regalia, the fist that struck him was made of solid stone and covered in auram metal. The punch lifted him into the air, flying in an arc until he cam crashing down on one of the benches, shattering it beneath him. He stared dazed up at the sky. Somewhere along the line it had gone from “evening” to real night, and the stars were out.

Is that what I've got? Tyram wondered. A weak soul?

Andry bellowed, sonic blasts firing from his gauntlets and bouncing off the statue's armor.

I don't want to fight anymore.

It wasn't true. He did want to fight. He wanted to make the universe a better place, like his grandfather had. Like all their teachers had. He still felt that desire. That need. Besides, if he didn't fight now, Andry would die. And probably a lot of other people. Did he want that?

No. No of course not. But I don't want to win either. I don't want to feel the blood all over me again. I don't want to find out what another piece of somebody feels like coming off in my hands.

He just could not reconcile the things he had done with his image of a hero. Not just because he had done such horrible things. That on its own he could have probably rationalized. No, because in the moment he'd done those horrible things he had enjoyed it. Not the blood and horror itself, but he had enjoyed the feeling of being strong. At exercising a skill he had worked so hard to perfect.

And Tyram could only think of a creature that would revel in battle and wind up holding a pair of torn ears or a ragged chunk of throat as a monster. Or think of a monster who would then flinch from the bloody aftermath of his spree as anything but a hypocrite and a coward.

I'm tired.

He didn't remember standing up. Birger hadn't noticed him yet, he was focused on Andry. The Lion Knight was screaming in pain, clutched in the statue's hands as it tried to crush him. Tyram didn't dare draw his sword, not in the middle of a city, but he summoned all the auram he could into his limbs. So much they felt overfull, ready to burst. He still didn't know what had happened when he fought Jalgoz, how in that moment he had been so much stronger, able to call on so much more auram, and he didn't have time to figure it out. He needed to end this battle.

One more time. I just need to be a monster one more time, and then it can be over. He clutched at the thought like a drowning man clutches at a piece of driftwood. He made it the center of his universe, the spearhead of his every action. One more time, one more time.

He leaped, a flying kick that sent his foot into the empowered statue's wrists. Metal and stone shattered under the blow, the hands crumbling to the ground with auram dissipating from them. Andry rolled aside and Tyram turned on the statue itself, punching it as hard as he could in the chest. The entire statue cracked in half and he swung with his other arm, turning the crackes into fissures that spread out from his fist and reduced the entire thing to glittering mist and dusty rubble. And through the cloud of shattered stone came Birger, gun pointed straight at Tyram's head, so the dragon knight delivered one more punch.

His fist went right through Birger's body, coming out through the pirate's back covered in blood. The pirate gagged in shock, coughing up blood, eyes locked with Tyram's.

“Thought you had weak eyes,” Birger rasped. “I...wrong....it's funny....you look...a little like the captain....right now.”

And then he went limp, falling backwards on the heap of rubble and rolling behind it. Tyram was just as glad he didn't have to look at the body.

“Holy crap,” Andry said, picking himself up off the ground. “How did you even do that? I couldn't even get a solid hit in!”

“I don't know,” Tyram said, walking away from the blood and rubble. “It just...needed to be done.”

“Where are you going?” Andry hurried to catch up with him.

“I'm going to sit,” Tyram said. “I know, I know the others probably need help, but they're all tough and I need...I need to sit for a minute. Just a minute, okay? Somewhere I don't have to look at the body.”

Andry didn't object, and the two young knights rounded the corner. Which meant neither of them was there to see when Birger's limp form stirred and the pirate laboriously pulled himself to his feet. He had no illusions of survival, the hole in his chest was a fatal wound and only stubbornness kept him breathing. He'd been killed, killed by the same young knight who'd killed Jalgoz. Killed, but he couldn't die yet.

There was one last thing he had to do before then.